


The Bright

by essien



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:33:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28452447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/essien/pseuds/essien
Summary: Between departure gates, on Sky, the Beeb and phone after phone, Hubei seizes up and Australia combusts. The globe runs your fever. Talk sizzles around you, in sparse spurts. Half a dozen businesspeople tut from humid faces, in a café, at a front-page photograph of two crooked, bandaged wallabies. One grooming the other. You’ll breathe through your teeth. Nearly choke on the cold.You wanted to know.--post bridge covid slow burn / one shot ?
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Kudos: 13





	The Bright

**Author's Note:**

> hmm, one-shot or epic, we shall see…
> 
> yes, yes, i havent uploaded the end of my last fic. forgive me, i was between computers when i wrote it, and assumed nobody would be invested. (correct away if i'm wrong). anyway, while it's still the Year of Perfect Vision... let's have an Eve perspective on a very 2020 beginning!
> 
> anne boyd's 'as i crossed a bridge of dreams' is a real composition. i'm not sure how i would describe it, but certainly not like eve does. 'russian rag' is also real, and by elena kats-chernin, one of my favourite composers - yes your honor, basic as charged. we might be hearing from ekc again, if this thing sprouts subsequent instalments (a thousand points to anyone who guesses which piece before time). i more or less agree with eve about the rag, but please, the path ahead of these guys is SO tinged, etc. and has been some time now. get with the program, girl. the compilation album's real too, of course (ABC Classics, 2019) - i've done my research, but really not all that much. anything else may be assumed a fib. blahblahblahblah
> 
> enjoy xx

January twentysomething

Okay, so... you asked.

Here’s what it’s like.

You sleep, you dream of precipitation. You wake, you hear it in every utterance. Sleet shrugging down your loose-top socks. Snow dusting her eyelashes. Hail skittering. Rain light as bubbles let from a syringe.

You trail behind a listing cart, well-cushioned feet losing purchase against the weight of it, keeping your distance enough from her to be seen as alone. She is dressed incredibly plainly and walks a walk nothing special. Though your irises itch to devour her, you totally lose track, till she speaks a word here or there and seeps through your skin, the inkling of an oncoming storm.

You bear a bulky set of decoy luggage, the world’s most touristy fanny pack under your coat, and your maiden name on an American passport pressing cockily close to expiry. All deliberate, of course, except for one point.

Your travel agent seems to have never considered that you might have gone by other names already. Polastri, to her, is eternally Eve. And vice versa. Any claim some husband may have had to that name? Unthinkable. It’s yours alone.

Perhaps it’s a perpetual-fugitive thing, or a millennial thing, or a lesbian thing, or just a her thing, such an oversight? Would a teenage her have carved ‘Oksana Leonova’ inside the cover of her composition books, or across her stomach in fingernail cursive like some dork did ‘Eve Springsteen, Eve Springsteen, Eve Springsteve, ha-ha oops... (Oh, I’m on fire)’ and later—well, if this doesn’t just show a lady’s age, no matter that this one fancied herself a tongue-in-cheek sophisticate saying it—‘Mrs Kevin Ramirez of 1466 Washington Drive, Unit 37, et cetera, etc.’? Hardly fathomable that you could have brought yourself to toy with those identities, thinking back now. But then, if one thing has always come easy to Eve Whothefuckever-Now, it would be being subsumed.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ was what Villanelle had said, with a veneer of unbearable earnest, ‘Me taking the liberty to rename you.’

She’d been adjusting a coil of hair at your temple, keeping just clear of brushing her knuckles down the edge of your cheek and tearing the breath out through the bone, when she smirked, sadly somehow, ‘There was really no choice. But next time we must uproot our lives, I promise to be more prepared.’

And, somehow, you heard a tacit promise of agency, immediately afterward, as it sluiced in a thick wash down your spine. Like, she would be prepared from being with you, knowing your wishes, to follow.

What wishes to follow.

And prepared to follow.

But so far you, collectively, as a pair, have snatched so few moments together, and so fleetingly, it is almost as though you never tried to game the orbit, or the trade winds… the whatever, into the tight, fraught swirl of yesteryear.

You wave a hulk of a suitcase off on the first rubbery jerks of its trek towards Lagos. For all you know, she does the same.

The strips of card you’ve been issued, to reunite you with it in Maputo, you bin. For all you know, she flees by rail and ferry and coach.

You hover alone, in sweet contemplation, munching on Party Rings. You wonder did she remember to pack her bananas somewhere above the canned food, where they wouldn’t get squashed? Whether unopened tins are allowed on a flight. About hijacking by ringpull. How much fruit could be jammed into an eye socket, ripe versus green. What has happened, that she does not want these thoughts to direct her anymore, either.

Fifty minutes later, at a different terminal, you check one of two cabin bags on ahead, all the way to Chennai. For all you know, she isn’t actually coming.

Your turn your grimace on the final bloated suitcase. Hours from now you could be sending it right back to Europe. This very airport, maybe.

Or Brazil, the Philippines, the bottom of Lake Michigan…

This charade seems like the most useless extravagance. It’s not the kind to fool you. But you concede that these baggage diversions might slow the more casual pursuer. And it sure sends a message. Unhurried, unflappable. Resources to burn. Could have harbor absolutely anywhere. Unlike the Twelve; unlike Britain—you are now a global power.

For all you know -couple. For all you know otherwise.

Past security, you sidle into a bathroom to change. Lid down, case off the floor. Shoulders freed, outer layer onto the purse-hook. The parka cups the door with what looks like relief. The hook is a foot or so too high, but just imagine if you could press it into the knot in your back and drape so soothed.

Fifteen minutes you stand, in the locked end cubicle, silent, slumped in empty cloth arms, awaiting the almost imperceptible tap of her sensible shoes. But all that comes in are a few stomps, clacks and scuffs and, eventually, a perfectly nondescript ‘hello, ’scuse me, sorry, you alright in there?’

So ‘Yes,’ you croak, ‘Fine. Just putting a fresh vest and pants on between flights.’

Is that too much information?

A noncommittal laugh betrays the wrong kind of recognition: not the recognition of your voice. So it’s not one of her characters going, ‘Wish I’d thought of that myself,’ before bubbling away, tossing a ‘Travel safe!’ at your feet like she cares. Cos it could have been. You know? It is hard to say whether it being her dropping the connection like this would have stung more or less than this not-interacting with her in private at all has burned. And… This is what you are in for. Just more wondering. Thinking yourself ragged.

A belaboring line from a phrasebook mists into your memory—‘You to me are missing.’—but the pull and clench through your torso still says otherwise.

The next few minutes go on your stretches. They’re hardly physiologist-perfect, but executed with whatever diligence you can cram into so tight a box.

Maybe, hopefully, there will be hydro facilities, wherever you end up. If you can ever pause long enough now to feel out an end. Can you ever bare your skin again without turning the flare on her? There must be options. A biker masseuse, or, or, a veteran’s leisure club. Someplace ripped bare of urges to question, or worse, disclose.

You take out your spare jacket, watch your case concertina by half, into somebody else’s. Somebody quiet, modest, malleable. Smaller and forgettable. Condensed, a wasted sun. Pulsing to yourself. All who cleaved too close flung, boiled, melted away, back in some other life. Darling Bill. Elena. Hugo. Niko. Kenny. Your chicken. For a wild second, you suspect Jess of preemptive pregnancy, deliberately timed to keep her from falling as far. Wow. To think it could have been so much simpler—a double-affair, with child. Another glittering comet, sailed away on an unspoken promise.

You shove almost everything that still matters up against your gut. Tuck your tee-shirt under a buckle, which chafes to work clear through. Zipper over everything. Flip up your hood, before you remember where you are, and trace it down again. Something ritualistic.

Make for the basin. Drink deeply, through your pores, unsated. Take your vagrant case. Leave London hanging, praying, pressed still to the door.

Between departure gates, on Sky, the Beeb and phone after phone, Hubei seizes up and Australia combusts. The globe runs your fever. Talk sizzles around you, in sparse spurts. Half a dozen businesspeople tut from humid faces, in a café, at a front-page photograph of two crooked, bandaged wallabies. One grooming the other. You’ll breathe through your teeth. Nearly choke on the cold.

You wanted to know.

You will have been fixed with more looks lately than you are yet accustomed to—ever since fleeing New Malden. Glares on the tube. Wide eyes on the run down from Paul’s. Suspicion in the queue at some sad little Tesco Express, where you pressed into her cloak but she held chastely to the basket of biscuits, bananas, tuna and Trek bars, out of her depth, bobbing softly against you with every breath. That one undisguised sneer, way back, at the bureau de change on the way out to Poland. (Oh, is it too late to warn you..? Yeah.)

But now these past few weeks’ fixation’s been shaken, if only for a moment, and the wider world can get a proper word in edgewise, you know. It clicks. They probably all took this… face? For Chinese.

It’s one of those belated realizations that make you relax and harden at the same time.

So you walk strong to the departure gate. You sit tall. And you rise, noble, when your row is finally called.

Someone rushes up to you, ‘Excuse me…’

At last. It is her! A German, maybe?

‘Jennifer?’ she reads off a scrap of paper. ‘You dropped this, uer, just before now.’

She stuffs the page into your hands, obscuring the surface. Her retreat is gentler. She flashes you a peace sign, and a smile to drench your heart.

Like always, it’s enough, even as it’s not. Poignant enough to be the last time. Little enough to whet, but not to obliterate. Laden enough to… pull.

You fake-heft your empty suitcase, just as they call out your row.

With a shock lack of incident, a Jennifer Song boards a flight to an emirate. Hopefully, a parallel story will go for one Nicole Judith Jennings, and they stumble into each other somewhere out across the sands. Or dehydration triumphs.

Oh the heat, the heat, the heat endures. It is an Australian airline, inexplicably, making this dash to Dubai from London. The atmosphere on-board is a curious mixture of grim solidarity and outright asshole-behavior. Small-talkers drop horror knowledge like pyrocumulonimbuses. Perfect monster-lures.

The shabby screen shoved at your face by some prick reclining a half hour in offers a smoldering-orange, new-release album. ‘Women of Note’, it sears. ‘Hidden in plain sight’. So instead of hauling him into the loo, shaving him down one plastic coffee-stirrer sliver at a time and evacuating him to vapor on the Adriatic breeze, you peel your crappy complementary headset free something like crisps in a movie theater.

There is a track you try: ‘Russian Rag’. Harmless, though tinged with something. Sentimental. A winking old romantic. Whimsical, even hopeful. Not very you; not very her. You could have believed so between tea dance and Tower Bridge—only you walked, readily enough.

Didn’t you?

If anything, it was pragmatics brought you back together so swiftly. Starting afresh was the practical choice.

Right?

But adjacent is a title just too on the nose to resist rolling your eyes at, right to its musical face: ‘As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams’. Ten minutes of deceptive stasis, of dogged incandescence seeming to twist and burl out of the growling static of these tireless engines, you in the center, a grimy little mote aglow. You play it. Over, over, over, over.

The chance comes with a glimpse of Jordanian haze. A surprise announcement from the captain provides the distraction, and you unfurl the note till now kept tight within your fist.

There is no ‘Jennifer’ among the crinkles. (Ugh, thank god). No ‘Eve’, no ‘Polastri’, no ‘Baby’, no ‘Song’. Only a sweaty run of flight numbers, a melted question mark and ‘I’ll settle for business class :)’

The pilot hushes, lamps surge, the cabin jolts, the jets wail on incessantly. You fool yourself into swirling your mind round imaginary details, string the nothing into patterns. They soon catch and disintegrate. Over, over, over, over.

You see, it’s circular. Once you find out, you will recall how you used to wonder. Over, over, over, over.

Over, over, over, over.

**Author's Note:**

> ?


End file.
